[spirited irish]

snip: This is what kosta refuses to accept “in principle” — i.e., without “proof” satisfactory to himself.

Spirited: The key words are ‘satisfactory to himself.’ Pride of Mind has seduced many people today into believing that whatever nonsense invented by their over-heated imaginations is the final word on everything. If they say the words it must be so and everyone else must-—without question-—accept their revelations as if from the Oracles of Delphi.

What we are witnessing here in America with its’ epidemic of narcissism is the hardening of the heart brought on when the soul turns inward away from God. As the soul turns inward there is increased fixation on ‘self’ and a corresponding blindness to reality and to ‘others.’ The inward turning soul is increasingly a dark soul unlit by the still, small voice of conscience. This in turn leads to the death of morally informed reason and the liberation of inflated, disordered passions and impulses, obsessions, neurosis, paranoia, and megalomania on whose behalf morally-dead reason is used. Solipsism is the usual result. Though the intellect still functions, the individual is in fact morally insane.

A wise man once said that it is impossible to reason with the quite literally-—unreasonable.

[Quix]

Well put.

And, sadly, seemingly quite too fittingly apt for my comfort regarding such folks and their eternal . . . heading.

[Alamo-Girl]

Pride of Mind has seduced many people today into believing that whatever nonsense invented by their over-heated imaginations is the final word on everything. If they say the words it must be so and everyone else must-—without question-—accept their revelations as if from the Oracles of Delphi.

Indeed. Thank you for sharing your insights, dear sister in Christ!

[betty boop]

Pride of Mind has seduced many people today into believing that whatever nonsense invented by their over-heated imaginations is the final word on everything. If they say the words it must be so and everyone else must — without question — accept their revelations as if from the Oracles of Delphi.

Yes; evidently we are supposed to submit ourselves, not to God, but to the self-selected "anointed ones." Thomas Sowell has written an excellent book detailing the types of mental operations to which these anointed ones are typically subject — Intellectuals and Society (2009). I believe you would find it of great interest, dear sister in Christ.

One thing the present-day self-selected anointed ones seem to have in common is the absolute denial of spiritual reality. In this way, they not only "get rid of God"; they also get rid of the human soul, whose moral and rational order depends on its relation to God. Thus the sanctity of the individual person can be dissolved into the abstract concept of man in the mass....

Thus the "turning away from God" constitutes the primary source of intellectual and moral disorder, of human persons and of societies alike.

Thank you ever so much, dear spirited irish, for your splendid insights!